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Slide Show | In Flint, High School Football Is No Game Chris Wilson, a former professional football player, returned to his Michigan hometown to coach its last remaining public high school team, offering lessons that go far beyond the field.

Chris Donovan

In Flint, High School Football Is No Game

By JUSTIN PORTER

December 1, 2017

Chris Donovan arrived in Flint after the scandal over the Michigan city’s contaminated water supply had been dominating national headlines. He was there, just like dozens of other journalists, covering the crisis. “When I first went, everything I was photographing was really obvious,” he said of his initial trip in 2015. “It was people handing out water, protests and people showering with bottled water.”

But the more he got to know the city and its people, the more frustrated he became with the popular narrative: that Flint was a bad place. So after the city’s turn in the breaking news spotlight, he has returned each year to tell the beleaguered city’s other stories.

He could relate: His hometown, Saint John, New Brunswick, is very much like Flint, with both industry and population shrinking. “I had no idea what to expect,” Mr. Donovan said, other than unemployed factory workers. He did find plenty of idled laborers, but he also found a city greater than the water crisis that still seemed to publicly define it long after the media had moved on.

Mr. Donovan was so dedicated to documenting that lesser-known side of Flint and its people that his friends gently teased him about spending spring break there. Mr. Donovan laughed and said it fits. He could either go back to his hometown in Canada or travel the much shorter five hours to Flint from Toronto, where he lives.

“I’ll continue to go back, and I’ll continue working in Flint probably the rest of my life, just because I have an attachment to the city and the story,” Mr. Donovan says.

Jaguars running back Cortez Jackson throws the football around before a home game against Saginaw High.

Chris Donovan

His latest story is about the last high school football team in the city, The Jaguars. The team was born from the merger of two schools, Southwestern and Northwestern Academies, and their two teams: the Knights and the Wildcats. It also nods to the athletic history of the city, which has produced dozens of professional football players over the years.

Chris Wilson was one of those. He graduated from Flint Northern in 2000 and went on to play professionally, first in the Canadian Football League and for Washington’s N.F.L. team. He is now back home overseeing the school’s entire program — from 8-year-olds playing flag football to the varsity level playing full-contact.

He has a simple but much-needed mission: To instill hope and purpose in these young men, in much the same way those values were instilled in him.

“By having sports start early, not only do we put out better talent and create a better brand of football, but now kids can know how to go to school and get their work down and strive for a goal,” Mr. Wilson said. Rather than turning to the streets to make quick cash, young people can discover new options and possibilities for a positive life and career though the discipline and teamwork of sports.

Alone Branch does pushups during training at Southwestern Academy.

Chris Donovan

The young men of the Flint Jaguars are, by all accounts, resilient and intelligent, growing up hard and playing a hard sport. To earn their trust, Mr. Donovan had to figuratively get off the bench. “A big part of the way that I work is sharing my own experiences with these kids to show them that I’m a human, that I’m not just there to take pictures and leave.”

He played basketball with them and talked with them, and their comfort with him is evident in his photos. Mr. Donovan is invisible on the field and the locker room, and the Jaguars are at ease around him enough to be themselves in their sport and in their emotions, whether those be grief, intensity or exultation. Under the stadium lights, or against the green school bus seats, they show up as young adherents of a beloved American sport.

Just as the rest of Flint has faced tough times, the school struggles financially, to the point that last year the sports program was hanging by a thread. The city is still plagued by toxic water, and off the field the players must contend with the dangers of every day life. But in those moments that Mr. Donovan captured on and off the field, it’s impossible not to see their strength.

Trey Huddleston gets ready for the homecoming dance while his mother watches; Alone Branch intently works out in the weight room, whether its football season or not. Jalynn Bond is somber one moment, walking through the neighborhood where he lost his brother to gun violence; the next, he’s grinning and flexing at his teammates in the locker room because one of them dared to suggest Mr. Bond was smaller.

Jalynn Bond flexes his muscles at one of his teammates.

Chris Donovan

As is his habit, Mr. Wilson stands at the center of them (Slide 7), leading a prayer to inspire the team before taking the field. At a game against their rivals, Saginaw High, a brawl erupted between players, and two police officers used pepper spray to break them up. Mr. Wilson and the other coaches restored order and handed out suspensions, but both he and Mr. Donovan criticized the use of pepper spray in ending a scuffle between teenagers, none of whom, Mr. Wilson noted, were being hostile to teachers or coaches.

The program still struggles, just like Flint still struggles. But while Mr. Wilson talks about those challenges and the sacrifices that have been made to keep this program running, he couches it in terms meant to motivate his Jaguars in their daily lives.

“If you haven’t folded already, in a poor city in America, dealing with a water crisis, guess what?” he said. “There’s nothing else out there for you. There’s nothing that’s gonna hit you harder than that.”